Obama administration’s aim to strike Syria divides opinion
President Obama is pursuing a course of military action against Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria. Here is a round-up of the debate over intervention in Syria.
President Obama is pursuing a course of military action against Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria. Here is a round-up of the debate over intervention in Syria.
The Syria debate shows that since the Iraq War politicians and the public have become less inclined to accept the word of those in authority.
Understandably reluctant to get entangled in foreign adventures after the war in Iraq, Barack Obama’s administration has been so keen to make a break with the past that it has failed over Syria to recognise that inaction often has deadlier consequences than action.
According to the dictum attributed to Edmund Burke, all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. Yet evil will triumph even more easily if good men help the evil-doers. In the Syrian civil war, with more than 80,000 dead and no end in sight, that is what the European Union has been doing, by upholding an arms embargo on the supply of weapons to all sides.
Despite the fact that Carla del Ponte, a former prosecutor for U.N. tribunals investigating war crimes in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, has talked only of “suspicions” regarding the Syrian opposition’s possible use of chemical weapons, her comments have gained a lot of attention over the weekend.
Cameron is right. Continued engagement with the rebels, especially around this sensitive time, will eventually bring results.
The international community has so far failed to fulfill its full duties towards the Syrian people. This must change.
We will be presenting a petition calling upon the government to support the Syrian people using all possible political, diplomatic and economic means.
David Cameron and Barack Obama have warned any move towards the use of chemical weapons by Bashar al-Assad “would force them to revisit their approach so far”.
Surely the pro-intervention success story of Libya will now spur the West to remove Assad as they did Gaddafi?
Shamik Das reflects on the capture of Bosnian Serb war crime suspect Ratko Mladic, and looks back at the bloody massacre, the genocide in Srebrenica in 1995.